You're Not Me, Sucker
by captain-jaybird
Summary: From age five to episode 2.08, Tony Sawiki's journey from rebellious little girl to the swaggering man we know today. Major warnings for dysphoria, substance use, underage sex mentions (age 15-16), intoxicated sex, and canon-compliant violence.


Antoinette Sawicki is five years old the first time she knows something's _wrong_. It's her first day of Kindergarten, and the nice lady her mom said was her new teacher is giving the class a tour of the elementary school. Antoinette's fidgety, always feeling like she has too much energy everywhere. She almost runs into the boy in front of her when they stop suddenly. He shoots her a glare, but stays silent as the teacher starts to talk.

"And her, children, is the restrooms," the teacher says. "Blue for boys, pink for girls."

Antoinette feels something in her stomach drop. She _hates_ pink. Pink is for princesses, and fairies, and the Barbies' heads who she throws across the room. Why can't she go in the blue bathroom? Antoinette knows she'd be happier, although she doesn't know why.

…

The first time her mother yells at her, really yells at her, Antoinette is seven. Halloween is a few weeks away, and Antoinette wants the perfect costume. She runs up and down the aisle, checking one and then the other—too girly, too weird, too icky. Her mother, exasperated, keeps bringing her costumes, but every single one is wrong. Why would Antoinette want to be a nurse if she could be a fireman?

The store doesn't have a fireman costume, though. Antoinette knows, she checked very carefully. She's about to give up when she sees it: her perfect costume. Spider-Man. It's cool and bright and totally kick butt. The mask is perfect, she thinks, nobody will know I'm not really him.

"Mom mom mom!" she yells, running up with the costume. "I found it, I found my costume!"

"You can't be that, that's for boys," her mother says dismissively. "Find another."

"Well, why can't I be a boy for Halloween?" Antoinette reasons. "I like boy things."

Her mother stops, and Antoinette watches the red flush across her face. She knows that's a bad, bad sign.

"You can't be a boy, you little idiot," her mother yells. "You weren't made that way!" Noticing the stares, Antoinette's mother strides over to the little girl and grabs her by the shoulders, hard. It hurts, and Antoinette is scared as her mother comes down and hisses in her face. "Now, you can be the nurse or we can go home right now and have no Halloween this year."

"Okay," Antoinette sniffles, trying not to cry. "Okay."

As she turns, Antoinette hears her mother mutter under her breath. "I swear they made a mistake at that clinic." Antoinette only half-understands, but she feels hurt worse than if her mother had slapped her.

…

Tony's first fistfight at school comes when she is nine. It's so stupid, but Greg deserves that busted lip she gave him, and it's not her fault if Greg's a sissy who went crying to teacher. She's waiting to be called into the principal's office, scowling as she remembers.

"Hey, Antoinette, you can't play kickball with us. It's a boy's game," Greg had sneered. "No girls allowed."

"My name's _Tony,_" she had shot back, "and I'm better at kickball than any of you stupids."

"Toni with an i is still a girl's name," Greg had said, condescending. "Go away, girlie."

"It's Tony with a y," she'd growled. "And I could kick your skinny butt, Greg."

"Oh yeah?" Greg had stepped closer. "I dare you. I _double dog_ dare you."

How could Tony not have hit him after that? She's no chicken. It's Greg's own fault his bark was worse than his bite.

"Antoinette Sawicki?" the receptionist calls.

"It's _Tony,_" she says, and goes into the principal's office.

…

It stops being okay to be a tomboy in fifth grade. Tony's not quite sure what happened, but suddenly all the other girls are wearing skirts, and makeup, and training bras. Tony's mother bought her a training bra, and she _hates_ it. It's tight and constricting and she never, ever gets used to the feeling of it around her chest. What's worse, though, is that all her guy friends are getting weird.

"I don't know if you can play with us anymore," Dave had said. "Everyone knows girls are supposed to grow up and be cheerleaders, not basketball players."

"Shut up, Dave," she said, and punched him on the arm.

Billy was worse, though. Billy wouldn't stop looking at her with his stupid moon eyes and he keeps trying to give her stupid smelly flowers. "Go out with me Tony," he pleads. "I know you'd be a pretty girl if you dressed up."

Tony doesn't want to be a pretty girl, and she's pretty sure she's broken because she doesn't get crushes like everyone else seems to. She's no one's future girlfriend.

Tony starts eating lunch alone every day. The girls will only be friends with her if she becomes one of them, and the boys only want her if she'll be the token girl in their gang, wearing pink or something. Tony has a feeling she's going to be lonely for a long time.

Tony gets her first period at age thirteen. She'd had a stomachache all day, and she leaves class to go to the bathroom. When she pulls down her pants to pee, she sees the blood, crimson red and staining her drawers.

"Fuck," she breathes, "fucking shit fuck fuck." Tony knew this was going to happen. She'd had Sex Ed (or whatever passed for it in the hoosier Midwest), but somehow she'd manage to block the fact that it would someday happen to her. Tony feels sick, and wonders if she'll throw up. Truth is, the last thing she wants is for her body to change.

Tony likes her small, flat chest, and her narrow hips. She had been proud of the fact that when she wore t-shirts (even with the stupid training bra), you couldn't see any bumps in her shirt, unlike the other girls who were starting to wear v-necks to show a hint of their cleavage. And Tony knows one more thing—girls usually stop growing two or three years after they start their period. She's barely five foot, and although he might be an absentee asshole, she wants to be tall like her 6'1" father.

"Goddammit," Tony swears. "What the fuck do I do about this?" She doesn't have any pads or tampons, and she'd jump in Lake Michigan during February before she'd ask the girls in her class for one. Sighing, Tony shoves some toilet paper between her legs, pulls up her pants, and makes her way to the nurse.

…

Tony's smoking a cigarette after cutting English class the first time she realizes she's looking at a girl like a guy would. She's fourteen, and finally found a group of people to hang with, even if her mother would haughtily put up her nose and call them 'bad influences.' Tony doesn't give a shit, because these people don't expect her to be anything other than Tony, and if she's being honest with herself stealing little things from the gas station gives her a thrill.

It's kinda like the thrill she's feeling while looking at Leah, Tony thinks. She can't stop looking at the rise and fall of her chest as she exhales smoke, or the way her lips wrap around the cigarette. For the first time in her life, Tony wonders what it would be like to kiss someone.

"What're you looking at me like that for?" Leah asks, eyebrow raised. "Did you suddenly turn gay or something?"

"Uh," Tony says (_smooth, Sawicki,_ she thinks), "no, I'm no lesbian Leah. Come on." And even though Tony thinks she might be gay, for some reason the word lesbian really does just sound wrong.

"Whatever," Lean shrugs. "If you were, I'd have this friend who's bi I could introduce you to."

It takes Tony a month, but she finally does pluck up the courage to ask Leah about her bi friend. Her name is Robyn, and they hit it off, sharing drags off a joint. The first time she kisses her, Tony's head is buzzing from the weed, and something clicks into place.

'_I guess I'm a lesbian, then,_' Tony decides later, although she prefers to call herself a dyke (the word is harder, less girly somehow). And if she catches herself looking at guys sometimes, she tells herself it's because she wants to be like them, not because she finds them attractive. She's nobody's pretty girlfriend.

…

The movie Boys Don't Cry comes out when Tony's fifteen, and her then-girlfriend Em drags her to it. It's not the kind of touchy-feely art flick Tony would normally see, but the sex with Em is fun and if it makes her happy, well, it's good for Tony in the long run. Tony likes sex, likes the way she feels like a guy when she makes Em gasp and moan, likes the way she can lose herself in it, and though she'd never admit it, having someone else like the body she hates makes her feel a little less like crawling out of her skin.

Something catches in her throat when Tony sees Brandon was a boy who used to be a girl. '_That's possible?_' Tony thinks. '_Fuck, I never…I…_' Whatever she's thinking, Tony can't finish, but she feels the thrilling, terrifying possibility of a maybe hiding somewhere deep inside her head.

As the movie continues, Tony sees Brandon beaten, raped, and then killed. Em is crying silently next to her, and Tony feels something freeze in her heart. '_That's what happens to people like me,_' she thinks. '_Him! People like __**him**__. Not me, never me. I can't do that._' Still, that slip-up, that tiny 'me' sticks, and Tony locks it in the back of her head, where only her darkest secrets go.

…

Tony discovers alcohol when she's sixteen, and she loves it. Em says she loves it too much, and eventually leaves, but Tony doesn't even care. If she drinks enough, she can forget her chest, forget her own body even. Her favorite place to be is the one where her head is spinning out, body so far gone she can't even feel it when she crashes to the floor. No one else understands, but being out of control is her eye in the middle of the storm. It's the only place where she loses herself entirely.

Tony sleeps with girls when she's drunk, sleeps with so many she loses count, can't remember their faces and names. It doesn't really matter, anyway.

One night, Tony gets so drunk she doesn't say no to the guy coming up to kiss her. Something flares in her stomach as she feels his mouth on hers, slides her hand down his strong, flat chest. She doesn't argue when he leads her to a bedroom, lays her down on the bed. She realizes, through a fog, she likes what she sees when he unzips his pants.

"I wish I had one!" she laughs. "I bet I'd fuck good with it!"

"You're drunk," the guy says, "stop being weird."

And then he enters her, and Tony feels wrong wrong wrong _wrong_, she wants to fuck him but not like this, not like a girl. She holds it together until he finishes, and then can't stop the tears.

"What is it?" the guy asks, not sounding like he really cares.

"Nothing," Tony shakes her head. "Nothing at all."

He leaves, and Tony feels sick. "I'm a boy," he whispers, "oh god, I'm a boy."

…

Tony drops out of school when he's eighteen, because he just can't take it anymore. All the 'she's and 'her's, all the whispers about "the dyke who thinks she's a boy" in the halls. Tony never came out in high school, he's not that stupid, but he cut his hair and wears men's clothes. He supposes that in this shithole town, that's enough for people to know.

His mother is certainly unhappy enough, but Tony is well past the point where he cares. He's heard enough of how he's a fuck-up, how the fertility clinic must have switched the test tubes, how his mother can't bear to show her face to the neighbors. He's had enough of dodging the plates she throws at him too (and on rare occasions, the slaps she actually manages to land).

He's kept the money from the last few scams he's run instead of blowing it on booze or weed, and Johnny said he's got a place to crash for a while. It's time to come clean (_ironic,_ Tony thinks, because there's no way his mother could see this as anything other than dirty).

"Ma," he says, loudly. "Mom. I got something to tell you."

His mother releases a long-suffering sigh. "What, Antoinette? What the hell have you done this time?"

"It's Tony, Mom," he says. "It's Tony, and I'm a boy. I'm transgender."

It's the first time he's ever said those words aloud, and he watches the storm cloud gather on his mother's face.

"How dare you," she spits out, "how dare you bring this into my house. You go up those stairs, Antoinette, and you don't come down until I _never_ hear of this bullshit again."

"I can't do that," Tony says. "This is who I am, and if you can't accept that, fuck you."

A vein throbs in his mother's temple. Her face is scarlet, and her mouth opens and closes.

"Get out!" she screams, pointing at the door. "Get out, and don't you ever come back!"

Tony grabs his bag and runs, the most curious mixture of freedom and grief pounding in his chest.

…

By twenty-two, Tony's gotten good enough at scams and heists he's got a place of his own, and while his income is by no means steady, it's enough to get him by. He smiles as he picks up his binder—it was the first thing he bought after he pulled his first big score.

Speaking of scores, he's got a sizeable one coming up, and this time he's got a partner. Sammy, a dude he met in a bar, who actually seems to be pretty cool. Tony keeps to himself mostly, he's unbearably conscious of his high voice and his baby face, and while he keeps in touch with a few fellow grifters, he never quite trusts that they really _see_ him.

Sammy's different, though. Sammy had seen him at the bar, and yelled out "yo, little man, come drink with us! I'm losing a drinking game, but I bet I could drink you under the table!"

Tony's never, ever been one to back down from a challenge, and he'd left the corner he'd been nursing his beer in and stumped over to the bar. "Alright man," he'd said. "It's on."

Over the course of the drinking game, he and Sammy had laughed and joked, and when the bigger man asked Tony to join him at the bar next week, he'd actually said yes.

The second time around, Sammy had seemed a little quieter, almost sad, and Tony finally asked him why.

"I lost my partner, man." Sammy looked down into his glass. "Got picked up by the cops. And we had a score planned in a couple weeks."

Maybe it was tactless, but Tony'd never been one to care. "I'm pretty good at scores," he'd said. "If you're in the market for a new partner."

Sammy stared at him then. "Alright man, alright. But I gotta be straight with you. You gotta be the silent one, or it'll tip them off that you used to be a girl."

Tony almost got up and left, then, but Sammy reached out and stopped him. "No dude, I didn't mean it like that. I don't give a shit what you've got between your legs. If you're my partner, it doesn't fucking matter. But I don't want you to get arrested because there's just not that many fuckin' transgender criminals."

"You don't give a shit, huh?" Tony said, playing it cool and tough. "Makes you one in a million." But once Sammy looked away, Tony allowed himself a grin.

He's still grinning thinking about it, Tony realizes. Yeah, he's looking forward to this score.

…

Tony's twenty-five by the time he's in one place long enough to jump through all the hoops to get on testosterone. Now he holds the bottle in one hand and the syringe in the other, unexpectedly terrified.

"Shit," he says. "I'm really gonna do this."

Sammy's with him, because of course he is. He and Sammy have been through everything together through the last few years, scamming and stealing, jumping from town to town. They're almost like brothers, now.

"You can do it man," Sammy encourages. "It's just a shot, and you've wanted this for years. This changes everything."

"It changes everything," Tony repeats, and plunges the needle into his leg.

…

One year later, Tony can't believe how good he feels. He's never been this comfortable in his own skin. He started growing his hair out when he started T, because why the fuck not? He can be a man however he wants, and it feels like a gratifying fuck you to everyone who says otherwise.

He looks in the mirror with a cocky smile. His shoulders have gotten so much broader, and his face is squaring out. He can see some stubble starting on his chin, and it still gives him a little flare of joy every time he speaks and hears it come out so much deeper. When he's got his binder on, he's exactly the man he wants to be.

Sex is so much easier now too, better. He's not frantically trying to lose himself anymore. Boys, girls, everything in between and outside of that, it's all so good. Now that he feels more confident in how other people see him, Tony can be with whoever strikes his fancy at the moment, without having to worry about the sex making him feel bad (_like that first time, so long ago,_ the voice in his head he still can't quite lose says).

Tony's a happy man, and truth be told he sometimes feels sorry for other people. He might have gone through hell for it, but he knows exactly who he is, and can't help but smirk at other people running around like ants, trying to find themselves.

…

Tony is twenty-eight, and Sammy is bleeding out in his arms. _No, no, god no no no no_.

"Shit, come on," he pleads, although he doesn't know to who. Sammy grunts and curses in pain. "Oh please don't, shit," Tony says, looking for something, anything, to stop the bleeding.

"Get out of here, just forget about it, you gotta go," Sammy groans. "Just go! I shoulda told you months ago, I was set up."

"What?" Tony gasps. "Who, who set me up?"

"You remember that cop that called?"

"She called out of the blue buddy, I didn't tell her nothin'," Tony responds.

"I know," Sammy grits out. "She wanted you because you're—augh!"

"What?"  
Sammy shakes his head, and Tony keeps packing the wound. "Hey, hey, you're alright, okay? Yeah?" It's a stupid hope, but Tony can't let it go.

"You gotta make me a promise," Sammy says. "You gotta pass on a message."

"Alright, well, well, what message? Huh?" Tony asks.

"You gotta find that cop. You have to find Beth Childs."

…

Messing with Felix has been fun and all, but Tony is no closer to getting his questions answered, and Sammy is still fucking dead. It's time to leave.

"I've given you all frickin' night, man," he says when Felix tries to stop him.

"I, I will tell you everything!" Felix argues. "If you just _wait_."

"Bullshit."

"Stop!" Felix runs in front of him. "You wouldn't believe me even if I told you."

Tony sighs. "Get outta my way." He shoves Felix.

"Tony!" Felix shouts as he slides open the door. "Tony—"

And then, suddenly, Tony runs smack into a girl coming up the hall. He looks up, circles around. "Woah…" he breathes.

"Shite," she answers.

"Tony, this is Sarah," Felix says, droll, but all Tony can think is that she looks just like him, before. Just like what he could have been.

…

"I've never had to do this with one of our own, before," Sarah says, as Tony looks at a portrait of himself as a scientist. With _dreadlocks_. "Cosima sorta jumped me into the whole clone…thing."

"Sarah," Tony says, "shut your yap for a second." He draws closer to her as she agrees. "Jesus Christ…" he murmurs, shaking his head and exhaling hard.

"You know, my mom always said they made a mistake down at the IVF clinic but, shit."

"You alright, mate?" Felix asks. "It's a lot to take in."

"Yeah, yeah. Look at us, we're hot," Tony says. It's the first time he's ever been able to see the beauty in what he used to be, because it's not on him. Sarah smiles. "Damn, girl."

"Not our usual identity crisis," Sarah mutter, mouth still upturned.

"Oh, I did all that a long time ago," Tony responds. "There's only one Tony, and you're not me, sucker."

Tony is surprised to find he actually means it. Clone, science experiment, whatever, it doesn't matter. He's his own man, and nothing, not even half a dozen identical doubles, could ever shake that. There really is only one Tony Sawicki, and he's standing right here.

…

AN: I personally am a transgender man, and while parts of this story were autobiographical, most of them are fictional (I mean, I'm not personally a con man, so). All name and pronoun choices were extremely deliberate, and the early on misgendering hurt me as much to write as it probably hurts anyone to read.

Tony was a very interesting character to explore, and I had a great time writing this fic, although it was difficult emotionally in places. I personally believe Sammy was Tony's monitor but a double agent like Paul, so you can read it with that lens if you'd like.

I'm a new author and taking requests, so if you have any just let me know. I'm disappointed this site doesn't have a Tony tag!


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